Buildings at night

Steven-V

I am working on deciding what city set(s) to use for the setting of my webcomic, and these cities all look great during the day, but not one of them seems to have a "night" setting. By this I don't mean exterior lighting that makes the outside look like it's night "out", but rather, the lighting of the windows. That is, most of the time at night, you will see some windows glowing with light from the inside and others not.

In many cases the windows of a single building can be selected in a block and modified, e.g., turning opacity down, so the first thing that occurred to me was perhaps putting an emitter of some sort behind the windows, but so far what I have tried has not worked at all

Are there some standard tricks with either the DAZ lights, or the Advanced lights, or perhaps UberArea, that one can use to make some windows light up but not others, and not the rest of the scene, to give the impression of light coming from inside the structure?

Herald of Fire

If the windows have separate material zones, you can use a little ambient to give this illusion. Rather than a white ambience though, use a slightly yellow or orange tinted ambient colour, or even a very pale blue for fluorescent lights. This gives a better illusion of indoor lighting without spoiling your scene with unnecessary extra lights.

Steven-V

Well, some of the buildings do have material zones for windows, but others don't (right now I am trying to do this with Urban Sprawl 2), So I end up with some of the buildings with lighted windows, and others not (if I use the ambient it will light up walls and stuff too).

It occurs to me that I might be able to use an Ambient Map like an Opacity Map... there seems to be a space to load it so I may try that.

Steven-V

Update:

At least for Urban Sprawl 2, Ambient does the trick. I set these to 200% but I think I still need to play with the intensity.

Also, as a note, Ambient Maps done't seem to work the way Opacity Maps do. At least, making a black-and-white map and applying it to Ambient Strength had no visible effect on the results. US2 mostly works for this, although several buildings inexplicably mix wall with window, so lighting up one lights the other, making those impossible to light correctly.

However, the overall result here looks acceptable (not counting the intensity tweaking I still need to do).

I have not lighted anything else in the scene (like street lights, car headlights, etc) yet.

kaotkbliss

If you don't mind me saying, I think you need some mid-size to small buildings behind your Urban sprawl to blend the foreground building more into the background image.